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August 26, 2010

Toronto Sun Steals Material From Blog, Then Defends Its Plagiarism

On August 18, Pension Plan Puppets -- a Toronto Maple Leafs blog -- posted an article from a Czech website, translated into English by a friend of the blog. It contained quotes from Frantisek Kaberle Sr, the father of Leafs player Tomas Kaberle.

On August 20, PPP noticed that David Fuller of the Toronto Sun had written an article about Kaberle Sr.

it is considered proper etiquette to at least acknowledge the source of your work. Doubly so when they are the ones that went through the trouble of translating an article into English.

In response, while Fuller admitted that he first saw the Kaberle story at PPP, he and his editor lied about how Fuller put his story together (using an on-line translator!) and defended the newspaper's plagiarism.

Fuller also explained that to have told his readers that the quotes he was using were first translated into English at PPP would have been "over-crediting, in my opinion". (PPP was not mentioned in his article at all.)

15 comments:

Traditional dead-tree journalism is really hurting. On the subway last night I came across a sickly-thin copy of the Patriot Ledger, which had as its A1 cover story, complete with color art, an essentially pointless column by one of their sportswriters about Tom Brady's hair. That's right. I had to keep checking to make sure it was just the masthead at the top of the page and not actually the front of the sports section, which would've been bad enough. Nope. It wasn't.

do something questionable / be called out on it / defend the fuck out of it saying you weren't wrong / let the facts state otherwise / be mum about the whole situation and let it "blow over" / the end.

just like the beltre ejection.

these fucks need to be contained in a room with a 50,000,000 (yes that says 50 million) watt lightbulb and plenty of waterboarding. (the one situation in which i condone such behaviour) - fuck 'em. if they can lie, then they can tell the truth.

i am sick and tired of shit happening that is a big issue for like 2 weeks, then everyone moves on. not that this is a big issue, but it is in a certain sense. i don't want to ramble on right now, but fuck sakes people....ok thats it for tonight.

Peter Abraham: "I'm pretty much to a point now where wins and losses aren't something I look at when evaluating a pitcher. Felix Hernandez is 10-10. If he played for the the Sox or Yankees he might be 18-2."

I fucking hate W/L. THIS SHOULDN'T HAVE ANY MEANING AT ALL except to say hey, you got the WIN, which means your offense scored more runs than you gave up, and you LOST because your offense SUCKS and couldn't score more than you gave up.

How the fuck... I mean, it's a rhetorical question, but this is MLB in a nutshell. They take something that makes NO sense and spins it some way to make it make sense to people. Or something. Or maybe they're all sheep.